


Dance On a Volcano

by SegaBarrett



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 07:55:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11353140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Will is drawn to Hannibal, and there is nothing he can do about it.





	Dance On a Volcano

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iberiandoctor (jehane)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehane/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Hannibal, and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Title is from a song by Genesis.

Will Graham rarely had a moment to observe Hannibal Lecter. It was usually, he imagined, the other way around – Hannibal observing everyone from his armchair, pursing his lips and watching as he set every piece, every play into motion.

As he watched them. As he watched Will.

And now Will could watch back.

Hannibal had a way about him, a walk that Will could not describe. He could see behind the scenes, could “see how the sausage was made”, somehow, but knowing the mechanics did not stop him from falling victim to them. Hannibal had a way about him; maybe he always had. 

Hannibal could see inside Will as well, no doubt. He knew all of the things that went into making Will into the man who he was, the man who could see inside the minds of killers and was always on the precipice of becoming one himself.

Hannibal, the man who was a killer and was on the knife’s edge of becoming human.

***

“William Graham. Sit up straight.” A pause, then the ear-splitting sound of a fist banging on the desk. “William!”

Will’s tiny eyes looked up, stunned and shocked, scrambling to follow the command, to comply. 

He was afraid most of the time. There were so many things for young Will to be anxious about, after all, and they were surrounding him every day and closing in an inch or a foot every second. 

“William!” the teacher repeated. She had large shoulders and big brown eyes that stared down at him and made him shiver. She was the scariest of the teachers because he could not predict her; not her moods, not her tempers, not her commands. 

All he could do was hop to it and try to respond. Speaking to his parents would do no good, after all. It was as if he was a ghost haunting a house, always there and making things move but never finding himself a part of something. 

He must try his hardest to be normal, even though he didn’t know what “normal” was supposed to look like. Did “normal” mean that everything everyone felt and said wasn’t supposed to hit him like a train going a hundred miles an hour? Was he supposed to be able to switch off like the rest of them did, like they were turning off a light?

He envied it, already. They were all so… callous. 

“You don’t pay attention in class. You’ve missed every single thing I’ve taught in this lesson, haven’t you?”

Will swallowed and looked up at the board.

“Prime numbers… Are only divisible by one and themselves,” he said quietly, trying not to feel heat from every other body in the room, trying not to let the eyes rest on him. Trying to keep from melting into an incomprehensible puddle and hiding under his neck (it wouldn’t do any good, anyway – he knew that much by now. Never did any good.) “That’s… what we were talking about…”

“Well, William. You should keep your eyes front so we know you’re paying attention.”

***

He always kept his eyes front when he looked at Hannibal, so that Hannibal would know that he was paying attention. That he was watching him, that he was learning from him. But what was he learning?

The empathy had always coursed through him, as long as he could remember, twisting his mind until he couldn’t do much other than stare at people and let their being flood them. 

“You wish that you did not feel,” Hannibal told him once, as they were sitting together on a balcony, looking over at the sunset. It was a beautiful sunset, and Hannibal was beautiful too, in the way that a Great White shark was beautiful in its deadliness.

Will knew that he should walk away, should have walked away the first time he saw beneath the veneer through to the real Hannibal.

“I see that sometimes it can be helpful,” Will told him diplomatically. And that part was true. He had saved lives with his gift. 

But what about his own? 

“That does not answer my question, Will. You have this gift, but it is not ungrateful to wish it had gone to another. It is a gift that weighs heavily on you. Perhaps we can assume that saints have felt the same?”

Will snorted. 

“I hardly think you could compare me to a saint, Hannibal.”

“Is devotion so… defined… by what one is devoted to? Or is it simply something to be admired, something to be bottled, maybe – does not everyone look for that? Hope for that? Wish to make such an impact that people will throw themselves upon their grave when they are gone?”

“Was that what it was like for you and Mischa?”

Hannibal quieted, and Will wondered if that strike at a nerve had led to a billowing anger. Was Hannibal a man who got angry?

“It is difficult to remember,” he told him, and then he walked away.

***

Will could remember what it was like to be the age Hannibal had been – the age Hannibal had been when he had lost his sister. Weird word, lost, like you could lose somebody and then find them again by putting up a poster on every tree.

Will was lost – he was sure of it – and Hannibal was, too. 

But if you were lost together, what did that mean? To take the aloneness, the loneliness, out of the equation.

Maybe that was what he was looking for in Will – someone to mentor, to protect.

No, nothing so innocent as that. He’d watch Will slowly go insane, after all, and simply watched him fall off the side of the world.

He couldn’t, however, convince himself that Hannibal Lecter felt nothing at all.

Nor could he tell himself that he felt nothing for Hannibal.

***

Will thought of himself, when he was young, as a mouse on a wheel, fighting against the slump that would ultimately send him reeling. 

It was too hard to predict what everyone else would do, what they might want from him. But it was easy to feel what they felt, every confused mixed up thing.

He could remember walking through the woods behind his house, sitting down on a dirt clearing and waiting for every tiny, furry animal to run by. He wanted to scoop them up and hold them against him, and he had never been entirely sure why.

Once, a chipmunk had sat in his lap, and he’d been amazed to not be strangled by the fear that got him whenever a person asked him a question. Animals had a language completely their own; perhaps it was pure emotion, or pure logic, Will wasn’t sure.

But there was a safety in it.

That night, he slept beneath the tree, and woke to find a tiny nest of rabbits beside him.

They were tiny and helpless and alive, and he couldn’t keep from sobbing no matter how hard he tried.

***

Will wasn’t sure exactly how he had come to be lying beside Hannibal Lecter, and he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to remember that story. He was there, however, that much was for certain. 

The bed was oddly warm, considering he was nestled in beside a cannibal. That shouldn’t be warm or comforting or anything other than bone hard throughout Will. Somehow, however, it felt like he was cuddling up with a new, yet completely unpredictable dog, one that could turn out to be one of the family or who could end up tearing him apart limb from limb.

He usually had an idea about the dogs, though. He didn’t have an inkling of what he should sense about Hannibal.

The man was sleeping, maybe, or not-sleeping, or pretend-sleeping or something in between. Will reached out and placed one hand on Hannibal’s, lying beside him and looking up at the ceiling as opposed to at his partner.

If he looked into the other man’s eyes, he was frightened about what he could end up seeing. What if he saw himself, the evil version of himself? What if he saw himself sitting as the next course on Hannibal’s menu?

Each seemed equally likely and equally, confusingly, appetizing. There was a darkness to each that felt like a hand drawing Will in by the collar, never letting go of him until it was done. Whatever “it” was. 

“Hannibal,” he said, and almost hated himself for it, for that turned the switch on it, on everything, set it all in motion. People were unpredictable; even he was unpredictable. Somehow, he said the name again.

Hannibal’s eyes flew open, as if they had been not closed but simply resting, perhaps on a quiet beach or in a trench in the middle of some World War. 

“Hello, Will,” he said, and Will’s heart constricted hard. 

There was nothing left to say, and yet there was everything left to fear.

***

Will couldn’t say exactly how their lips ended up together, or how he found his hands on Hannibal’s hips. The man was warm against him, pressing against him and almost suffocating him.

He needed to fight, he couldn’t let Hannibal win. But win what, exactly? Everything that was happening was making Will’s mind dizzy, but he did not – not – want. He did not want to want.

Wanted to walk out and leave Hannibal in the dust and become a man who knew when it was the right time to smile and it was the right time to look somber. Become a man who knew how to do all of the paint by numbers.

But what he did was unbutton Hannibal’s collar and pull off the face that he put on to look normal.

And delved into the darkness. 

It felt like Hannibal was digging inside his head, wearing him as his new disguise, and when he let himself go against the other man’s hand he thought he would burst into tears and melt away. 

But he didn’t. 

He could feel himself drowning, after, lying next to him and reaching up against the clouds, wondering how long he could cling to the good before the darkness closed the vacuum over his heart forever.


End file.
